Acquia Coverage

Have you ever had a new house built, or maybe watched one go up in your neighborhood? We live in a growing community and now that the economy is improving, construction is exploding again. We have two houses being built across the street, and two more where the lots are already sold. In each case, once they were ready to begin construction, the first task was to dig a hole and insert metal frames so that the concrete foundation can be poured. Once the foundation is in, they can build up the rest of the home’s walls, flooring, windows, siding and rooftop.

Your website is that foundation. Your site needs to be the structure on which the rest of your marketing is built, and therefore, it must be solid and well constructed.

When I started my web development firm in 2007, I knew that building static HTML websites was a thing of the past. They were inefficient for customers, and I hated having to update them. At the time, the prime choices for building dynamic, independent websites were WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and DotNetNuke. After careful evaluation, I chose to specialize in Drupal. Since then, WordPress has improved dramatically, DotNetNuke is virtually dead, and Joomla is still pretty much the same. Drupal, meanwhile, has continued to improve and remain, in my opinion, the top choice for professional-grade websites.

Here's how I think about a platform — you work in a platform. A platform is designed for a specific business function like marketing, sales, HR, finance, etc. Platforms connect to other platforms, so integration is key.

The important part of the definition is that a platform is something you use every day, and plays a critical part in the success of your role. For example, the Acquia marketing team lives inside of Marketo, setting up programs, writing emails, scoring leads and analyzing results. Marketo is the first application we open in the morning and the last we close at the end of the day. It plays a pivotal role in making sure we're passing the best leads to sales at the right time, while nurturing our earlier stage prospects.

Enterprises, like all businesses today, are trying to survive in a time of digital disruption. The market is beyond competitive. Look at how digital pioneers like Netflix and Amazon have transformed their industries. It’s only a matter of time before that happens to every industry, if they aren’t ready to innovate.

Open source allows enterprise business to place its bet on the freedom to innovate. The global developer communities bring unforeseen development speed, and the lack of high license fees mean that resources can be invested in a great digital experience. Most importantly, though, open source provides the freedom to innovate, plan out your own product road map, and respond quickly to market demands. That equals survival.

This week, I received an email from some marketing folks that Acquia was announcing they are open sourcing their mobile application code for posting content to Drupal sites. For those that don't know, Acquia is a commercial open source software company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. This isn't the first time Acquia and other Drupal vendors have given code back to the Drupal community and you can be assured it won't be the last.

Honestly, I had not been following the development of Drupal Create so it's taken me some time to better understand the significance of this story to open source. SparkPR's Eric Sokolsky explained it to me in his email this way:

Today, Acquia released source code that will allow Drupal website content owners and developers to create their own customized mobile content publishing apps. These apps – the first of their kind on the Drupal platform -- will enable developers to create or curate content on their iOS phones and publish it directly to their existing Drupal-based sites – without being tethered to a laptop or desktop computer.

If I didn't know any better, I would have thought Acquia was eavesdropping on some recent discussions I've had regarding my observation on the potential conflicts between open source vendors and open source communities. Their action alone suggests that perhaps I worry too much. Let me explain.

Like posting content to Drupal sites from an iOS device? Acquia, the commercial provider of Drupal Web CMS services, has released the code base for building native iOS apps that can post content right to a Drupal website — the first of its kind.

Produce Content from an iPhone or iPad
What has to be one of the most difficult things for website owners to do is to create content from a mobile device — any content producer will vouch for this painful reality. But while laptops and desktops provide ease of use, they are not exactly practical to use when publishing content on the go.

Some work related items have to be done remotely as is seen in the many discussions on the bring your own device phenomenon. Quite often, however, this is in the context of document collaboration, social media and other collaborative work settings and rarely about content production. In this case it's widely accepted that mobile devices are really not preferable at all.

Excerpt of Executive Summary | View Online Below or Download PDF
Throughout the ages, technology has played an essential role for government to craft a better society for citizens. In the Roman Empire, the aqueducts revolutionized services provided to Roman citizens. Leveraging gravity alone, the Romans were able to transform communities, providing water to distant cities and towns, and create an engineering marvel that would lead to years of economic dominance and influence society for years to come.

Report Highlights

Report covers a recent survey from GovLoop community on how agencies are moving to digital solutions to meet increasing demands from citizens

Insights based on interviews with government leaders and experts from our industry partners

Special section: 6 Ways Emerging Technology is Facilitating Digital Government

The chief digital officer, a relatively recent addition to the C-Suite, is already making his influence felt on today’s technological landscape and, by extension, everyday living. Companies that have yet to hire a CDO, but who regard a great digital customer experience as core to the business, should consider making room for one.

From morning coffee (Starbucks Corp. has a chief digital officer) to the evening panel discussion at the local university (Harvard University has one as well), there’s now a CDO considering the digital implications of experiences that you might not expect. Going through Times Square, I’m reminded that NYC now has its own chief digital officer, that there’s a CDO at the nearby CVS Caremark Corp., and a CDO at the New York Stock Exchange.

It’s fairly easy to pinpoint the trickle-down difference at this everyday level, compared to the days prior the appearance of the chief digital officer. Whether you’re Whole Foods Market Inc. or Warner Music, you now likely have somebody — even if he or she doesn’t have a CDO title — with full responsibility for how technology frames the customer experience. It’s at this personal interaction level where the CDO’s impact is most keenly felt.

Drupal is one of the most popular Web content management systems in higher education, but that doesn't mean every university uses it effectively.
Scott Lozier, a senior Web developer at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., says the open source CMS was already in use there when he arrived about a year and a half ago, but it was being used in a scattered way.

Acquia has announced four key appointments to strengthen the team in their new Australian office and support the Acquia Cloud, an scalable hosting environment for Drupal deployments.

The company helps enterprises to create extraordinary web experiences based on Drupal, the open source platform that integrates content, community and commerce. Offering a variety of SaaS solutions specifically designed for Drupal, Acquia gives global organizations the unparalleled ability to rapidly deploy and manage multichannel content across web and mobile devices.

Open source software company, Acquia, has made some new hires to boost its local presence and Cloud offering.

David Peterson has joined as senior Drupal advisor. He has worked on many Drupal sites, including the ABC’s Hungry Beat and digital radio properties. He will be tasked with sharing his knowledge in the local Drupal community, offering training, encouraging local meetings and assisting partners with tenders, architectural issues and customer engagements.

Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal and the developers of Mollom, just announced the release of its new content moderation platform. Mollum is a Content Moderation Platform service that analyzes content quality on a website and filters out spam or inappropriate messages. Content moderation is a challenging and time-consuming job, but Mollom’s advanced solution makes the task quick and easy.

According to one of the developers, Dries Buytaert (of Drupal fame), “I feel like we’ve secured our place as the leading enterprise-ready content moderation system.” The new rollout is the climax to two years of development, 600 beta testers, and millions of filtered comments.

Drupal is one of the most prominent content management systems and is used by about 2.1% of all websites worldwide. Alex Fisher, a native of Dearborn, Michigan was able to build a business with six employees by designing websites using Drupal. Commercial Progression counts organizations like National Geographic Channel, TRW Automotive, the University of Michigan, and Detroit Public TV as customers.

Fisher worked at Ford’s communications division for 7 years while attending school at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. This is when Ford used to have a TV network with several channels broadcasting programs demonstrating how to fix and sells cars. After working at Ford, Fisher joined a company called Move Networks, but was laid off along with many other employees in 2009. This is when Fisher decided to take the plunge and start his own company with a $4,000 investment of his own money.

Drupal 8 will be the open-source project's "boldest release to date", according to Drupal's creator, Dries Buytaert. The new version of Drupal is due at the end of the year or "whenever it's ready" and includes significant behind-the-scenes changes, such as the incorporation of elements of the Symfony2 Web framework.

Buytaert, who is also the founder of Drupal services firm Acquia, has ambitious goals for Drupal, as it continues to shift away from purely a content management system towards a unified Web platform that organisations can standardise on to build Web-based services, for both internal and customer-focussed sites.

Holly Ross joined the Drupal Association on 1 February as its executive director. Techworld Australia caught up with Ross at DrupalCon Sydney seven days into her new role to chat about her background and the top priorities for the DA in 2013.

Prior to joining the DA, Ross was the executive director of the US-based Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). "Our mission was to help non-profits use technology to meet their own missions," Ross said. NTEN's work focuses on two key areas, Ross said: training and education, and community building.

"That community building role was really the heart of [my] work. But it was really broad — so we talked about telephony and security and databases and social media and websites. It was really easy to stay focussed on the trends in each of those areas and not necessarily always have to know the minutiae. Obviously this community [Drupal] goes a lot deeper, so that'll be an interesting transition."

Los Angeles, Calif. – International Women's Day, Colocation America announced their Second Annual "Top 5 Women in the Data Center Industry 2013." After researching numerous candidates, Colocation America named Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer for Hewlett-Packard, Joanne Olsen, Senior Vice president of NAS Applications and Cloud Services for Oracle Corporation, Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and Founder for HotLink Corporation, Kathy Warden, Corporate Vice President and President Information Systems sector for Northrop Grumman, and Angela Byron, Director of Community Development for Acquia Inc as the most influential women in the data center industry of 2013.

"We've received numerous amounts of gratitude on last year's list and we knew that we had another opportunity to show our appreciation this year", says Shawn Ahdoot, marketing director of Colocation America. "These women have paved the way in our industry and will not be forgotten, but to be remembered by the young and inspired minds of today. We only hope that their stories of success can be duplicated by the next generation of the inspired," Ahdoot adds.

These women join last year's 2012 list of powerful women that are making a difference in the industry. In order to expand and promote more women, Colocation America added the "honorable mentions" list in which readers can comment and suggest the women in technology that have and continued to inspire them.

The next version of Drupal, Drupal 8, is due to enter feature freeze on 18 February, followed by a code freeze on July 1. Drupal 8 will be released at the end of the year or “whenever it’s ready”, Buytaert said. So far more than 4700 patches have been submitted for Drupal 8, by more than 1000 contributors, he said.

Highlights of the next version include better mobile support, including responsive design to adapt sites for display on devices with different form factors, improved configuration management to make it more attractive for larger, more complex sites, and better integration with third-party services.

“People are excited about the direction we are going in for a number of different reasons. But even despite the fact that Drupal 8 looks very promising, I do believe we have a long way to go,” Buytaert said.

Drupal currently runs 2 per cent of the world’s websites, Buytaert said, but there’s no reason the community shouldn’t aim for it to run 10 per cent of them. Drupal’s creator cited Linux and Firefox as examples of open source projects with significant market share.

Open source digital services provider Acquia has released Drupal Commons 3.0 to help with the creation and management of customer communities and social-driven applications.

Acquia's most recent focus has been on expanding their global presence with US $30 million in funding that was used to further sales and marketing in Europe and Asia Pacific and by bringing its Drupal hosting provider to Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.

With Drupal Commons 3.0 the company aims to build on a previous release, the Open WEM initiative for digital marketers by offering clients a Drupal powered, open sourced, social business tool that brings together content, community and commerce platforms.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/27/13 -- Cloudwords, the first cloud-based translation management application, today announced the launch of Cloudwords for Drupal, a first of its kind integration with a translation management platform for the world's largest open source content management system (CMS). Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, is a key partner in bringing this module to organizations using Drupal with an integration and automation capability that has not previously been available. Today's announcement marks a first for the translation management industry, as Cloudwords will be the first translation management platform to offer pre-packaged integration with Drupal 7.